Thursday, January 19, 2006
Skip The Meeting
They devised a pair of hypotheses, educatedly guessing that:First of all it is amazing that someone paid someone to "prove" that which anyone could have told them without the research.
1. The more meetings one has to attend, the greater the negative effects; and
2. The more time one spends in meetings, the greater the negative effects.
Then they performed an experiment to test these two hypotheses. Thirty-seven volunteers each kept a diary for five working days, answering survey questions after every meeting they attended and also at the end of each day. That was the experiment.
The results speak volumes. "It is impressive," Luong and Rogelberg write in their summary, "that a general relationship between meeting load and the employee's level of fatigue and subjective workload was found". Their central insight, they say, is the concept of "the meeting as one more type of hassle or interruption that can occur for individuals".
But anyway, are metings necessary? Yes, but not so often as they are held and they can be done far better than they are. Communication is the key, a meeting is but the tool. Too often we confuse the tool with the job the tool is supposed to accomplish.
What is it Jack Ryan says just before he is lowered from a helicopter onto a submarine mid-ocean becasue he has to meet with the captain? -- "Next time, write a memo."
Related Tags: meetings, communication, boredom, hassle, study, research, funding
